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Chicken Fork is a modernized, high-performance, native VNC and RDP remote desktop client for macOS. Based on the classic Chicken of the VNC codebase, this fork updates the application to run natively and smoothly on modern macOS architectures (including Apple Silicon and Intel) and modern display configurations.
Chicken Fork has undergone significant modernization to enhance stability, display performance, OS integration, and compatibility:
- Native Microsoft Remote Desktop (RDP) Support (2026.11): Integrated full RDP client capabilities powered by FreeRDP 3.32.2 and OpenSSL 3.x, supporting modern Windows Server and Windows 10/11 hosts with Network Level Authentication (NLA/CredSSP), TLS encryption, mouse cursor shape synchronization, and clipboard transfer.
- Dynamic Desktop Resizing: Added support for resizable session windows when connected to VNC servers that support dynamic desktop resizing.
- Retina Display & High-DPI Stability: Fixed an off-by-one boundary checking bug in framebuffer drawing that caused out-of-bounds memory access and crashes on Retina screens.
- Automatic Clipboard Synchronization: Synchronizes clipboard content automatically when the session window gains focus or right before sending middle mouse button events.
- UTF-8 Extended Clipboard Support: Added support for the VNC "extended-clipboard" protocol, allowing seamless copy-paste transfer of non-ASCII and UTF-8 characters between macOS and the VNC server.
- Universal Binary Support: Build target configurations updated to compile a Universal App (native
arm64for Apple Silicon andx86_64for Intel).
- The "Liquid Glass" Visual Revolution: We retired the charmingly retro, pixelated chicken icon and replaced it with a brand-new, ultra-glossy "Liquid Glass" logo. Sporting translucent, eye-straining 3D glassmorphism, it depicts our beloved chicken mascot paired with a dinner fork. Does it improve connection latency, fix memory leaks, or reduce CPU usage? Absolutely not. But it does make the app look like a premium, VC-funded SaaS utility, which we all know is the real measure of software engineering excellence.
- Lightweight & Native Cocoa UI: Built specifically for macOS, using native Cocoa controls for quick start times and minimal memory footprint.
- Secure SSH Tunneling: Easily establish secure connections to remote hosts through built-in SSH tunneling.
- Fullscreen Mode: Supports native macOS fullscreen mode for immersive remote management.
- Multi-Connection Profile Manager: Store and manage profiles for multiple servers, including keyboard profiles, color depth settings, and connection behaviors.
- Version 2026.11 — Product renamed to Chicken Fork, version bump to 2026.11, and FreeRDP 3.32.2 integration.
- Version 2026.9 — Touch Bar support, Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) authentication, SSH passphrase guidance, and fullscreen space management fixes.
- Version 2026.6 — Universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel), dynamic desktop resizing, UTF-8 extended-clipboard, Retina display fixes, and application modernizations.
- macOS 11.0 or later
- Xcode 12.0 or later
- Clone the repository and initialize submodules:
git clone https://github.com/ays7/chicken.git cd chicken - Open the Xcode project:
open cotvnc/ChickenFork.xcodeproj
- Select the scheme (e.g., Chicken Fork) and build/run (
Cmd + R) or archive it to build the Universal release application.
For packaging signed and notarized .dmg releases for direct macOS distribution via GitHub Releases, refer to the Apple Developer ID Code Signing & Notarization Guide.
Chicken Fork is distributed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 or later (GPL-2.0+). See LICENSE.md for details.
Precompiled release binaries bundling FreeRDP and OpenSSL (Apache 2.0) are distributed under GNU General Public License v3.0 in accordance with Section 9 of the GPL-2.0 ("or later") clause.